Abstract
The detailed richness of Chaucer’s storytelling and the subtle mechanics of movement in his narrative process can be seen as reflections of the poet’s deep and long-standing fascination with the concept of motion itself—a subcategory of “change” in the medieval world. Within Chaucer’s plotted structures, narrative climax tends to coincide with a pivotal moment of material transformation taking place in the sublunar region of mutability (literally, “below the sphere of the moon”). Underlying structural patterns of interconnected action, interspersed with commentary and dialogue, will culminate in a single, phenomenal incident of physical change. The Canterbury Tales illustrates this narrative technique quite patently. Consider the rapid corruption of Arcite’s body in the Knight’s Tale, the swift transformation of the loathly lady in the Wife of Bath’s Tale, the instantaneous disappearance of the black rocks in the Franklin’s Tale, the transformation of the child in the Prioress’s Tale, the alteration of human blindness into the sight of angels in the Second Nun’s Tale, and the white crow’s sudden metamorphosis in the Manciple’s Tale. Indeed, change in Chaucer’s world is ubiquitous, ongoing, and inexorable. Barry A. Windeatt rightfully remarks on how Chaucer’s inventive literary structures “contain the narrative within a commentary that has transformed meaning by the time the poem reaches its resolution in the structures Chaucer has devised (‘That thow be understonde. God I biseche!’ Troilus v, 1798).”1
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Notes
Barry Windeatt, “Literary Structures in Chaucer,” in The Cambridge Companion to Chaucer, ed. Piero Boitani and Jill Mann, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 215.
Roy Arthur Swanson, “Ovid’s Theme of Change,” The Classical Journal 54 (1959): 201.
In The Book of Duchess, Chaucer avoids the physical transformation of Seix and Alcyone into seabirds: see also Elizabeth Allen, “Flowing Backward to the Source: Criseyde’s Promises and the Ethics of Allusion,” Speculum 88 (2013): 688.
Robert M. Longsworth, “Privileged Knowledge: St. Cecilia and the Alchemist in the Canterbury Tales,” CR 27 (1992): 87.
Hugh of St. Victor, The Didascalicon of Hugh of Saint Victor, trans. Jerome Taylor (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1961), 54.
Aristotle, Meteorologica, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes and trans. E. W. Webster (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 555.
Jacqueline Tasioulas, “‘Dying of Imagination’ in the First Fragment of the Canterbury Tales,” Medium Aevum 82 (2013): 227–8.
E. V. Gordon, ed., Pearl (Oxford: Clarendon, 1953), lines 1067–74.
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Edward Grant, Physical Science in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 21.
David C. Lindberg, The Beginnings of Western Science: The European Scientific Tradition in Philosophical, Religious, and Institutional Context, Prehistory to A.D. 1450, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 286.
Paul Beekman Taylor, Chaucer’s Chain of Love (Cranbury, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University, 1996), 23.
Paul Strohm, “Chaucer’s Lollard Joke: History and the Textual Unconscious,” SAC 17 (1995): 23–42.
See also Martin Stevens and Kathleen Falvey, “Substance, Accident, and Transformations: A Reading of the ‘Pardoner’s Tale,’” CR 17 (1982): 142–58.
Stephen A. Barney, “Troilus Bound,” Speculum 47 (1972): 450.
Martianus Capella, The Marriage of Philology and Mercury, ed. William Harris Stahl, Richard Johnson, and E. L. Burge (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), 3.
Barry A. Windeatt, “The Scribes as Chaucer’s Early Critics,” SAC 1 (1979): 120.
See, for example, Robert Schuler, “The Renaissance Chaucer as alchemist,” Viator 53 (1984): 305–33.
Quotation from Ralph Hanna, “Literacy, Schooling, Universities,” in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Culture, ed. Andrew Galloway (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 188.
Ian P. Wei, “Medieval Universities and Aspirations to Universal Significance,” in The Global University: Past, Present, and Future Perspectives, ed. Adam R. Nelson and Ian P. Wei (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 138.
Michael H. Shank, “Academic Consulting in Fifteenth-Century Vienna: The Case of Astrology,” in Texts and Contexts in Ancient and Medieval Science: Studies on the Occasion of John E. Murdoch’s Seventieth Birthday, ed. Edith Sylla and Michael McVaugh (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 247.
C. H. Lawrence, The Friars: The Impact of the Early Mendicant Movement on Western Society (New York: Longman, 1994), 181–217; 174–5.
Glending Olson, “Measuring the Immeasurable: Farting, Geometry, and Theology in the Summoner’s Tale,” CR 43 (2009): 414–27;
William F. Woods, “Symkyn’s Place in the Reeve’s Tale,” CR 39 (2004): 17–40;
Kathryn L. Lynch, Chaucer’s Philosophical Visions (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2000).
J. D. North, Chaucer’s Universe (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), 7.
G. M. Trevelyan, Trinity College: An Historical Sketch (Cambridge: Trinity College, 1943), 5.
Derek S. Brewer, “The Reeve’s Tale and the King’s Hall, Cambridge,” CR 5 (1971): 311–12.
See also William H. Watts, “Chaucer’s Clerks and the Value of Philosophy,” in Nominalism and Literary Discourse: New Perspectives, ed. Hugo Keiper, Richard J. Utz, and Christoph Bode, (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997), 148.
J. A. W. Bennett, Chaucer at Oxford and at Cambridge (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1974).
Edward Grant, The Nature of Natural Philosophy in the Late Middle Ages (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2010), x
D. W. Smith, “Phenomenology,” SEP (Fall 2011), http://plato.stanfc.rd.edu/archives/fall2011/entries/phenomenology.
Edward R. Dijksterhuis, The Mechanization of the World Picture (London: Oxford University Press, 1961), 21.
A. C. Spearing, “Dream Poems,” in Chaucer: Contemporary Approaches, ed. Susanna Fein and David Raybin (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010), 164.
Jessica Rosenfeld, Ethics and Enjoyment in Late Medieval Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 108.
Quotation from Helen Cooper, “I(A) the Miller’s Tale,” in Oxford Guides to Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 99.
Walter Clyde Curry, Chaucer and the Mediaeval Sciences (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1926).
For books related to Chaucer’s interest in optics, see Peter Brown, Chaucer and the Making of Optical Space (Bern and Oxford: Peter Lang, 2007);
Norman Klassen, Chaucer on hove, Knowledge, and Sight (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1995);
Carolyn P. Collette, Species, Phantasms, and Images: Vision and Medieval Psychology in “The Canterbury Tales” (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001);
Suzanne Conklin Akbari, Seeing through the Veil: Optical Theory and Medieval Allegory (Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University of Toronto Press, 2004).
See, for example, Marijane Osborn, Time and the Astrolabe in “The Canterbury Tales” (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002)
Sigmund Eisner, ed., A Treatise on the Astrolabe, A Variorum Edition of the Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, vol. 6: The Prose Treatises, part I (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002).
Richard Kieckhefer, Magic in the Middle Ages, Canto ed. (1989; repr., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 134.
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Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, Le Roman de la Rose, ed. Ernest Langlois, 5 vols., SATF (Paris: Firmin-Didot (vols. 1–2) and Champion (vols. 3–5), 1914–24), 4.16087–105.
For the translation, see Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, The Romance of the Rose, trans. Charles Dahlberg, 3rd ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995).
Pauline Aiken, “Vincent of Beauvais and Chaucer’s Knowledge of Alchemy,” Studies in Philology 41 (1944): 371–89.
Richard Firth Green, “Changing Chaucer,” SAC 25 (2003): 51.
Nicolette Zeeman, “Medieval Religious Allegory: French and English,” in The Cambridge Companion to Allegory, ed. Rita Copeland and Peter T. Struck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 149.
Quotation from Hoccleve, The Regiment of Princes, ed. Charles R. Blyth (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1999), 96 (line 1964).
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© 2015 Alexander N. Gabrovsky
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Gabrovsky, A.N. (2015). Introduction: Chaucer’s Sublunar Region of Mutable Forms. In: Chaucer the Alchemist. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137523914_1
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